Tuesday 29 August 2006 05.30 EDT
First published on Tuesday 29 August 2006 05.30 EDT

The late-night bars and jazz clubs are open in the French Quarter, as are the cafes in the elegant Garden District. One year after the worst natural disaster in US history, New Orleans is gamely giving the impression that the good times are rolling again.

But a couple of miles to the north or east, the Cajun bravura falls away like a cheap carnival mask, the streets fall quiet and the Crescent City becomes a dead zone.

Hurricane Katrina left behind less than half of New Orleans. The storm killed 1,500 people and scattered the rest. Out of a pre-hurricane population of 450,000, so far just over 200,000 have returned to build their lives, according to independent estimates. The others have either found better options elsewhere or are waiting in trailers for government reconstruction assistance and a development plan that has so far failed to materialise.

"Does it look like they're doing something here?" asked John Washington, looking up and down his street in the Lower Ninth ward, a poor black district in New Orleans east.

As far as the eye could see on the eve of Katrina's anniversary, there were the rotting shells of his neighbours' houses. The summer air hung heavy with the sour taste of mould and decay.

He was one of a handful of returnees trying to go it alone, gutting his family property before it succumbed to rot. He was stacking up salvaged pictures when a framed painting of Jesus fell, shattering the glass and further darkening his mood. He picked it up and flung it back in the house, shards and all.

In the Lower Nine, as the district is known, and the low-lying suburbs on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, streets of crumpled houses and desolate shops have sat abandoned since the flood walls broke when Katrina crashed into the Gulf Coast a year ago today. Mississippi and Alabama were hit too but they did not lose an entire city and have bounced back quicker.

In some areas of New Orleans the only signs of life are the occasional Humvee full of national guardsmen - summoned in June to help control gang violence - and fluttering placards promising "We tear down houses" or "Houses gutted $1,600 or less".

The Lower Nine has been the worst hit. Other districts were further below sea level, but none were poorer.

Old wooden "shotgun" houses - long buildings one storey high and one room wide - were thrown off the cinder blocks they had been jacked up on (as a futile precaution against flooding), and crushed by the floodwaters that burst through the broken levees on the nearby industrial canal. "Cars were floating by. Houses were floating down the street," said Mr Washington, who sat out the storm in a room above his stepmother's church, the Queen Esther Spiritual Divine temple, before swimming to safety when the waters began to recede. "I heard people screaming, howling for help."

Many, perhaps most, of the city's dead came from the Lower Nine. They were the least likely to hear the warnings and many did not have cars to escape in. The bodies were washed away with the floodwaters or left to rot in attics. Their names are recorded in black felt tip on white flags that cover a lawn in the Metairie cemetery a few miles away. Nearly half the flags are blank, representing bodies that have yet to be claimed or identified.

All the dead will be remembered today at a number of ceremonies that have drawn politicians from Washington keen to point fingers of retrospective blame or salvage their reputations. George Bush will be one of the latter.

Two weeks after the flood, with much of the city still under water, Mr Bush stood in Jackson Square and announced a visionary manifesto for reconstruction, promising "this great city will rise again" adding even more ambitiously: "We will build higher and better."

Twelve months on, the people of New Orleans are asking who he meant by "we". Federal money has yet to reach the streets. Not long after the Jackson Square speech, the president pulled the plug on a congressional reconstruction bill aimed at buying up flood-damaged properties, consolidating them, and selling them to developers to redesign the city. It was replaced by a less ambitious and much cheaper plan. The White House, reporters were told, did not want to get into the "real estate" business.

Nor did any other branch of government. The city's mayor, Ray Nagin, toyed with the idea of consolidating the city on a smaller "footprint" and turning low lying areas, such as the Lower Nine, into green space. Faced with a difficult re-election campaign Mr Nagin dropped the idea and declared the market should decide New Orleans' fate.

Planning is a dirty word among Lower Nine residents. Only 200 of the area's 14,400 pre-storm population have come back but at a meeting over the weekend, local civic leaders were shouted down when they presented a plan that would turn much of the empty space into parkland. "Where's my house on your plan?" asked a heckler, who declined to give his name. "Give people the money and let them rebuild. They're Americans. They can do it on their own."

A city planner told him there would be no money until there was a plan, but the crowd was suspicious. Most people interviewed in the district believed the floodwall had been dynamited under the cover of the storm by white developers. "For years they wanted this land. Now they figured out they got an opportunity to get it from us," said Henry Irvin, a 70-year-old stalwart of the Lower Nine.

Katrina broke other levees last year, flooding all-white neighbourhoods, but the conspiracy theory is rooted in history. The levees around the district were dynamited in 1927 by whites trying to drive out other groups - an act that left generations of deep distrust. "They dynamited it in '65 and in 2005 too," Mr Irvin insisted. "There were loud noises that night that people heard that could only be explosives."

As for today's government he said: "They can all kiss my ass. I'll do my own house." That spirit is powering neighbourhood self-help groups but also creating a snaggle-toothed cityscape. It is unlikely to produce a sustainable community, but rebuilding is an act of faith.

"Did they give up in 1776?" Mr Irvin asked, summoning up the memory of America's war of independence. "Did they say: 'This is hard so let's go back to England ... I put my trust in God, and I've got a Browning 12-gauge shotgun too."

How the disaster happened

Sunday August 28

9.30am Mandatory evacuation ordered in New Orleans. 10,000 people huddle in city's Superdome.

Monday 29

3am Canal floodwalls begin to breach.

6.10am Eye of Hurricane Katrina makes landfall at Buras, on Louisiana-Mississippi border; 135mph winds destroy the small town completely.